IBM Releases GPLd WinModem Support For Linux 144
horst writes: "Subject says it all -- IBM has released first
GPL winmodem driver. Link found at LWN" I'll be even more excited when they release the code that works with my T20 ... I've never even dialed my modem *sniff*, but if you've got an MWave (600, 600E, 770) then you should be golden. But props to IBM for making a cool move.
Hopefully it's not an isolated one.
Ironic (Score:1)
Driver quality (Score:1)
One would hope Linux developers were generally more switched on to writing decent code, although it may just be the underlying hardware to blame!.
In saying that, top marks to Big Blue for doing the right thing.
renaming will occur soon? (Score:3)
A shred of hope... (Score:1)
It does, however, give a nice shred of hope to those of us who can't really afford an external or expensive internal modem.
One thought though. Since this IS GPLed, could we use it to make more modems work? I don't know if it is, but if the MWave uses the AC '97 standard, we could get things moving quickly. Intel may actually have helped Linux again. (Note: If you are an Intel PR person, don't say that this was your original intention; admit that you made a mistake. We would still love you...)
Just make the MDP3880-W(U) a priority, k?
You are a muppet. (Score:1)
+++++
Intel? (Score:1)
and ASDL too (Score:4)
It will be here [alcatel.com].
whats with hiding spec anyway? real modems? (Score:1)
of course, i still dont know why ibm just doesnt just use real modems. they worked great in the earlier models. i somehow doubt the cost difference would be more than a few more dollars at the factory...
Thinkpad user hopes... (Score:1)
Linux has been wiped off my drive twice due to interconnect failures.
I've also flown > 20K miles with it (I know some readers will laugh, but I'm a tech guy), and it still works. Two years of a laptop doing well for me, and two separate Linux attempts makes me hopefull. Ill at ease, but hopefull. Hell, I like BSD and Solaris, so I know I'm going to be shot down, but laptops are different. People need easy, fast, interoperable [whatever] before they'll even comment. No cares about which layer it acts on, or whether it is proprietary, _people need email_. The rest is cool, too. I'm done.
Sure, modems are dead, or something.
Tell me that when I need to get email through via a random hotel.
-j
Developed from NT driver (Score:1)
The driver though is developed from the NT driver which IMHO is a good sign. NT is way more linux like than Win9X/Me.
Don't know if thats enough to get the MWave back on it's feet. I have heard of problems with IRQs and other things which led me to suspect that the MWave while a great design in theory was a poorly executed design in the real world
See for example
/usr/src/linux/Documentation/sound/mwave
http://www.ibmmwavesettlement.com/
on the matter
Sell (Score:1)
Well, atleast I have RoadRunner now
This is not GPL source (Score:4)
Its good to see IBM following through (Score:1)
Hopefully they can now sell there linux certified laptops with more of a clean consciusness.
I do not know if this will help the other winmodem users (see www.linmodems.org) there is a lucent driver that works with my saterlite 4030cdt but hope fully this will help to getting an open source driver (or a second sound card)
The other modem releated question is those amr (audio modem riser cards)
does anyone know howto / if these work under linux
Good move, but good enough? (Score:3)
Some problems can be overcome simply by the experimenting programmer (compile-run-crash type), but it will be a real pain. Why not open up for the documentation so that the MWave board can show it's potential: A bunch of resources (dsp, soundcard, telco interface, midi interface) tightly knit together with the dsp chip in control.
Call me fanatic
Winmodems (Score:2)
Even so, I've never really liked the premise by which winmodems work. They use the sound card and clock cycles to generate the modem-y sound, and then send it out on an RJ-45 (or whatever phone cable is). You'd think in the day of cheap hardware, it wouldn't cost that much to just adda nother processor (small) onto the modem itself and free up the other hardware a bit.
Also, wouldn't it be nice if other generic winmodem manufacturers see this open standard of sorts and comply to it?
For those who know, can this winmodem driver be ported to BSD and other OS's pretty easily?
Not too bad ... maybe (Score:2)
I can see a trend, here : when the technology of a piece of hardware is not hot anymore, they open the specs/ release the driver, so that they found a new market in Linux users.
Well, not that I like to be a second-class user. But OTHA, I'v never been keen to hot hardware, either. And a driver is better than no driver. And an open-source driver is better than a half-hacked binary one (Lucent, please, follow IBM example! ).
Re:whats with hiding spec anyway? real modems? (Score:2)
Disclaimer: I know nothing of intentions. The following is drawn from observations
MWave isn't just a modem. It's a generalised DSP solution; effectively a DSP co-processor. Originally, way-back-when on the 750/760 even series Thinkpads, the MWave chip provided soundcard support (SoundBlaster Pro emulation I believe) and Modem support; the MWave chips ran a mini-multitasking OS that would time-slice these tasks so you could play Doom online thru the modem and still hear sound. There were some obvious drawbacks to this approach - IIRC if you wanted 33.6K modem dialups you had to fallback from stereo to mono 22KHz soundcard.
I believe the design point was that soundcard+modemcard cost more than MWave and thus the total system cost was cheaper; the side-effects of a software upgradeable soundcard and modem were secondary.
Some of the Aptiva model desktop PCs also got the full MWave for sound + modem (or was it sound only? I forget).
What I don't understand is why in newer Stinkpads (such as the models referred to by the article), the MWave hardware (presumably in cut-down form) is only used for modem function; the sound card function is provided by a standalone chipset (uur... CS4236+ I believe). This Makes No Sense to me.
Does anyone else who can organise thoughts more coherently have any better insights into the history here?
Great! But I'd still prefer the Ethernet version (Score:2)
You'll also need the Linux PPTP driver [mit.edu]. Hopefully it works with these USB drivers.
Jacco /var/log
---
# cd
It only took 2 years+!!! (Score:1)
James
T20 should be fine (Score:1)
Check out http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/kharker/linux-lapt
for more info.
Of course, this was with redhat 7.
I dunno about others.
Correction (but it's still not free software) (Score:4)
Re:Intel? (Score:1)
If the thinkpad internal modem is AC '97 compatible (which would make sense, since laptops do try to save space and using Ac '97 would help), we can reuse the AC '97 code for other AC '97 modems.
Re:You are a muppet. (Score:1)
Sheesh!
I am a muppet. (Score:1)
I retract all allegations of muppethood.
+++++
Are winmodems really that bad? (Score:5)
In the process of doing a web search I then turned up Stuart Cheshire's old home page [stanford.edu]. For those who don't know who he is, well before the web was popular he wrote a classic networked Mac game called bolo [stanford.edu]. (In fact when the web became popular the bolo players used to curse that the web was dragging the internet down too much...) Most links to it are dead, but the official home page is still up [lgm.com] although there has not been a release since 1995 [lgm.com]. (This was apparently done as research into the needs of interactive networked programs. Gee, all of those hours that I spent as a test subject without knowing it...)
With Stuart's credentials established, it is well worth looking at his rants [stanford.edu]. In particular his latency [stanford.edu] rant, which was expanded out into a white paper [bolo.net].
Once you are through reading those you will see that for anything interactive, particularly games, what really matters is latency, not bandwidth. And modems are a major source of this latency. In addition he and John Carmack agree that software modems (AKA winmodems) can be (though they are not currently) programmed to operate in a mode that reduces latency, and the result would be better for interactive games than conventional modems.
So, are winmodems just a bad idea, or are they just poorly implemented? Conventional wisdom says that they are bad no matter what. But the people who should know best suggest otherwise.
-snellac
Could the be the end to real modems? (Score:1)
Double correction (Score:5)
They aren't even technically part of the 'driver'.
You have the freedom to make their modem work on *any* hardware platform now; just not to steal their DSP code.
What we really need... (Score:1)
community in general.
What we really would need is an opensourced/GPL'd implementation of all the dsp-like algorithms used by software modems. They are currently high valued property by some manufacturers and therefore only given out as binaries for linux drivers if given out at all.
IBM does it that way, and AVM (famous manufacturer of ISDN cards here in germany) did the same when releasing software modem / fax emulation.
I would really love to see one of the main linux players sponsoring an open source development of such an implementation. This would allow the support of many winmodems after all (just replace the modem specific interfacing stuff), fax / modem emulation with all isdn cards, usage with ham radios and much more nice possibilities.
There _are_ some opensource efforts (see www.linmodems.org for some pointers) but they are stuck in some main points and could probably need some financial support as well as development help by DSP specialists.
So Redhat, VA or whoever feels responsible: Put some of your money here. Many people of the linux community will be grateful
What about the lucent one? (Score:1)
Now for me to be able to use both internet and 2.4.1, I actually have to ipmasq via a windoze box at home...
Thinkpad shopper hopes... (Score:1)
Re:Double correction (Score:2)
But if the DSP sources would have been open-sourced as well, it would have been possible to port them to other Winmodem (and ISDN4Linux) hardware as well. That would have made a huge difference.
This is a good beginning, though.
Re:Could the be the end to real modems? (Score:1)
Sure of that? I happen to have a Lucent winmodem on both my Linux boxes, bought when I still dual-booted. I often do other things, while downloading, and since I have flat rate I often leave connection open. Never got disconnected because of lack of CPU.
Sure, a 'real' modem would be better. But so would be two CPUs ...
It's all matter of trade-offs. The real concern is that in this case is not the user which makes the trade-off, since winmodem are often built-in in mass-marketed computers.
Re:Good move, but good enough? (Score:1)
Re:Are winmodems really that bad? (Score:5)
In IBM's case, this model is not what's being used. The MWave is a DSP. So the "cheap" argument goes out of the window, except in that IBM recognised that a DSP could be used for multiple applications, and originally the MWave chipset was implemented by them exactly that way. My TP 760XD for instance uses the MWave chipset to provide both modem functionality and 16 bit soundcard support. Latency isn't likely to be a problem as the communications between the DSP and the "PC space" is much tighter than it is with a conventional modem, which usually goes via a real or imagined serial link controlled by a conventional UART chipset. So latency is going to be better than it would be with a real modem, but not as good as it would be with a conventional Winmodem.
Essentially you could say there are three types of modem: Conventional, open, serial modems, which will work with everything at a minor latency tradeoff, Winmodems, which will only work with the operating systems (or rather system, support for non DOS Windows based operating systems is rare, and that includes other Microsoft operating systems such as NT) supported by the manufacturer, and will slow down your computer's performance with a small advantage in the latency stakes, and Other Proprietry Modems, such as the IBM MWave set-up, where you still have the problem that the OS has to be supported by the manufacturer, but neither reduced performance or latency are real issues.
On the face of it, if someone could invent a generic device driver mechanism, or even just force, somehow, manufacturers to produce open source drivers, IBM's approach would probably be quite good. As it is, a year or so after IBM started this project we have a driver that only addresses the modem side of the MWave and only works with the later, less popular, Thinkpads. I'd have rather they worked on the soundcard functionality, a good PCMCIA Modem costs less than $30 on eBay these days. Grumble.
--
Keep attacking good things as "communist"
Re:renaming will occur soon? (Score:2)
I have always called them that. I *hate* the word "winmodem".
Moan, whine, etc (Score:1)
- The MWave DSP is used on Thinkpads to provide Soundcard and modem functionality. We can get cheap PCMCIA modems for $30 on eBay. However getting decent sound card support on a MWave laptop isn't as easy - we can use the infamous Linux MWave hack, which gives us fixed rate 22.1kHz 8 bit sound which doesn't work with the majority of sound playing applications out there in my experience and which resets itself and ceases to work if the laptop is ever suspended, or get a PCMCIA Soundblaster card which is usually pricy and, to the best of my knowledge will have exactly the same problem with low sound quality => poor compatability. In short, why concentrate on the largely redundant modem functionality?
-
I'm glad IBM are supporting the last set of Thinkpads to come with MWave chipsets, but given there are almost certainly many, many, more Thinkpads and Aptivas out there with the older chipsets, is support coming for those machines? I couldn't see anything to suggest so.
I guess it's a matter of priorities, but... I wonder whether enough documentation exists that would allow a reasonable programmer to implement the missing functionality using the IBM driver as a base?--
Keep attacking good things as "communist"
Re:Double correction (Score:3)
Sure there is. If you want to fix or improve the DSP part, or even understand it (or build sonar with it). Which are very big parts of what opensource is about, not just "it can run everywhere", but "it runs good".
I expect with the DSP part you could make a "voice modem" and build your own voice mail system.
IBM did a good thing making the kernel part opensource, but the DSP part is still closed source, and to get full advantage of this hardware you need that part too.
Re:This is not GPL source (Score:1)
Real topic "Patent Pending" ! (Score:1)
Flo
PS: Patents are evil but better stick them into hardware as HW is not really interesting to copy anyways.
Re:Double correction (Score:1)
I thought the point with theese "win" modems was that they did not have in dsp, but insted relayed on the main cpu as dsp.
Re:Double correction (Score:5)
Re:renaming will occur soon? (Score:1)
Re:This is not GPL source (Score:2)
Re:Intel? (Score:1)
Re:Not too bad ... maybe (Score:2)
Re:What about the lucent one? (Score:2)
That's not true any more, although I'm somewhat unsure of the legality of it, as it doesn't appear that the original ltmodem source code was officially released by Lucent but rather leaked by a third party with source access...
Anyway, if you have a Lucent winmodem, check out http://walbran.org/sean/linux/stodolsk/ [walbran.org] where a fully working open-source driver based on the original Lucent driver is available. It has numerous bugfixes compared to the original Lucent binary-only release, and compiles cleanly for both 2.2 and 2.4 kernels.
Re:This IBM story is NOT killed by Slashdot. (Score:2)
The DSP files CANT be open source because of FCC (Score:1)
Most of you wouldn't know what to do with MWAVE DSP source code anyways... You don't need it.
But does it work (Score:1)
Re:Double correction (Score:2)
//rdj
Re:This is not GPL source (Score:1)
Unless I'm mistaken, the lucent source package consists of some c files and a binary library.
Not open source, but good enough for me to get my lucent modem working under kernel 2.4 in a compaq armada e500...
Re:renaming will occur soon? (Score:1)
GNU==GNU's Not Unix...
Damn, you've got me.
Re:A shred of hope... (Score:2)
The mwave modem appears to be a DSP-based solution (coltrollerless modem?) and a lot of the source is some very non-open-source binary DSP files that get uploaded to the onboard DSP. Seeing as how v34 (etc) are all pretty tied up in patents & licencing, this explains the release. They've released a soft-ish modem driver that will work with some machines. It's not a generic AC'97 "let's do DSP stuff on the actual PCM audio data" modem, and as such isn't a huge amount of use for many people
It's great if you have an IBM 600E laptop, though. I've got a Vaio...
Hugo
Re:renaming will occur soon? (Score:1)
--
Re:Could the be the end to real modems? (Score:1)
I had (and still have, it's in there somewhere
I too suffered from the problems of shitty connection, and frequent hangups when the CPU is loaded, there is probably a way to give realtime priority to the module / pppd but I didn't find it.
On top of that, an interface must have changed because I couldn't get that mother to work in any kernel > 2.2.14 which is a bit of a drag in the fast moving releases of today.
In the end I went out and bought a cheap RealModem(tm) and things are much better than they were, but i agree that linux drivers
easy and expected (Score:2)
IBM has been releasing drivers and support for all their laptops with linux.
If Taco had posted which problems he has with his T20, I could point him to IBM's Linux Technology center where they have the answers.
I will come back and reply to this with the correct link where t20 support can be found.
(I thought Rob liked Vaio's! good on him for using a thinkpad!)
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
Just say thank you!! (Score:1)
But props to IBM for making a cool move. Hopefully it's not an isolated one.
Didn't you mom teach you manners? Just say thanks man!
What about printers? (Score:1)
Anyone know how to get one of these printers working?
Re:Double correction (Score:1)
But still I think this is a very good thing IBM has done... and I doubt that you'll get more than this out of them... at least at this stage...
--
Re:Are winmodems really that bad? (Score:2)
Re:Are winmodems really that bad? (Score:1)
The point is, how much latency is the serial connection actually adding? 10-20 ms? Any significant improvement will likely require least a 50% latency improvement and it's hard to see a perfect Winmodem driver cutting 120ms into 60ms.
I'd love to know what the actual improvement really is and at what point the gaming community considers latency problems "cured". My online gaming experience with Half-Life has been that anything much over 250-300ms latency (measured in HL terms, which isn't really ping latency) starts to get really laggy.
Re:Winmodems (Score:2)
The real culprits for the bad rap that "winmodems" get are the cheapest of the cheap modems which do everything in software, suck up lots of CPU power and aren't worth the circuit boards they're printed on.
Re:Great! But I'd still prefer the Ethernet versio (Score:2)
They're afraid of the federales (Score:2)
-russ
Re:This is not GPL source (Score:1)
--
They never will (Score:5)
-russ
Re:We gotta rename!! (Score:1)
Re:This is not GPL source (Score:1)
--
It will never happen (Score:2)
-russ
Re:Are winmodems really that bad? (Score:2)
The MWave in particular is hated. Newer versions may suck less but one of the original problems was that since it doubled as a sound card you couldn't be online and listening to sounds/gaming at the same time. It also had nasty problems connecting.
IBM had extremely poort support for the product and indeed had a lawsuit brought up against them. No idea what happened to that.
On the other hand there was a tech next to me that played Jedi Knight with his Supra winmodem and never had a disconnection.
Re:This IBM story is NOT killed by Slashdot. (Score:2)
-russ
Re:It will never happen (Score:2)
Of course some countries still have such strange laws written, but they aren't followed that close anymore. Noone will sue you, if you use your winmodem with your own software. And btw: The IBM driver isn't certified as well. So what?
You shouldn't have used your +2 Bonus for posting this, does not give a good light on you.
Re:Are winmodems really that bad? (Score:1)
Now we have to thank them... (Score:1)
Paul Schroeder [mailto]
Mike Sullivan [mailto]
thankyouthankyou
Re:This IBM story is NOT killed by Slashdot. (Score:2)
And anyone who can seriously combine the words occupied and palestine in the same sentence reveals that they know nothing about history or current events.
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
GPL appropriate for driver code? (Score:3)
Not that I'm waiting for Winmodem drivers (I'll use a real modem thank you) but there may come a time that there is practically no choice (think of laptop-integrated winmodems).
WinModems and Wine (Score:1)
That question has just haunted me since I tried to install linux on my HP - I've a got single card that does everything - at home...
And when can we.... (Score:1)
--DrMyke
IBM Rocks (Score:1)
Re:Did anyone bother to read the article? (Score:2)
When the Nazis took over, they siezed control of all German business. Either businesses played ball with the Nazis, or failed and were destroyed. I don't defend Nazis.
If you're going to accuse IBM, at least go to NYU and get the facts rather then rely on this questionable new report floating around and the book on which it is based.
A recently published book, as well as a recently filed lawsuit against the company, speculate on the uses of Hollerith equipment by the Nazi government and IBM's role.
IBM finds the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime abhorrent and condemns any actions which aided their unspeakable acts. It has been known for decades that the Nazis used Hollerith equipment and that IBM's German subsidiary during the 1930s -- Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen GmbH (Dehomag) -- supplied Hollerith equipment. As with hundreds of foreign-owned companies that did business in Germany at that time, Dehomag came under the control of Nazi authorities prior to and during World War II. It is also widely known that Thomas J. Watson, Sr., received and subsequently repudiated and returned a medal presented to him by the German government for his role in global economic relations. These well-known facts appear to be the primary underpinning for these recent allegations.
IBM does not have much information or records about this period or the operations of Dehomag. Most documents were destroyed or lost during the war. The documents that did exist were placed in the public domain some time ago to assist research and historical scholarship. The records were transferred from the company's New York and German operations to New York University and Hohenheim University in Stuttgart, Germany -- two respected institutions with academic credentials in this area. Independent academic experts at these universities are now the custodians of these records and supervise access to the documents by researchers and historians.
IBM remains interested in any new information that advances understanding of this tragic era, and looks to the appropriate scholars and historians to verify it.
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
Re:This IBM story is NOT killed by Slashdot. (Score:2)
I'm a Pedant and I'm Okay (Score:1)
The proper initialism is "ADSL" (not "ASDL"), which stands for "Asynchronous Digital Subscriber Line". It's common for people to want to put the S before the D, as in "ISDN", but it's not correct. If anything, use that as a mnemonic device - it's the OPPOSITE order of "ISDN", it's "ADSL".
Not trying to sound condescending, but rather an attempt at being informative.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
Re:Double correction (Score:2)
Mwave worked with os/2 and windows, only because these were the operating systems IBM provided drivers for originally.
MWave relies on a programmable DSP which can be made to do anything.
there are mWave sound cards, modems, ISDN cards (WaveRunner, my dad designed it), and ROM drives.
The Rom drive is interesting, it's a mwave controlled cd-rom drive that can be reprogrammed into a dvd-rom drive. Very flexible.
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
Re:Are winmodems really that bad? (Score:1)
Brian Macy
Re:easy and expected THAT URL (Score:2)
Linux Hardware Configuration and Compatibility Database.
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
Unlikely (Score:2)
But if the DSP sources would have been open-sourced as well, it would have been possible to port them to other Winmodem (and ISDN4Linux) hardware as well.
Unlikely, since as I understand it, the ACP (MWave) modem design is radically different from most (eg. Rockwell or Lucent) "winmodems". For one thing, the MWave actually does have an onboard DSP, but it's a more general purpose one than in more traditional serial modems.
Your suggestion is similar to trying to port a program to Windows by looking at its Macintosh Assembly Code. Technically possible, but more work than anyone cares to do.
----
Re:Great! But I'd still prefer the Ethernet versio (Score:2)
Re:I'm a Pedant and I'm Okay (Score:2)
Soft modems are evil. (Score:2)
Also, some of the FAX state transitions must occur within certain time windows. This is very hard to ensure with a soft modem. Doubly hard when the softmodem is a USB softmodem.
No friends, kudos to IBM for this, but please avoid soft modems if you can!
Re:Are winmodems really that bad? (Score:2)
Re:Intel? (Score:2)
The cool thing was that your machine was probably originally advertised with a 14.4Kbps modem, and that was later software upgraded to 33.6K. Every competing laptop with a built-in modem was still at 14.4 and is still at 14.4K.
The other good thing was that you didn't have to deal with the kludgy DOS/Windows PCMCIA drivers, where maybe after an hour of tweaking you'd have a 50/50 chance of getting a PCMCIA modem working. maybe. The MWave just worked and had relatively straight forward AT scripts.
As far as the sound support went, the SoundBlaster emulation was always much better than the various ESS laptop chips of the era, and the MIDI support vastly superior to anything you could find a in a laptop. And yes, you could play sounds and use the modem at the same time (although you probably wouldn't want to use it for online gaming or streaming audio! But those weren't exactly popular applications back in '94)
What's a modem? (Score:2)
Friends don't let friends operate at speeds less than 256K
Re:Are winmodems really that bad? (Score:2)
Modem standards were also changing rapidly, and IBM was able to go from 14.4K to 28.8K to 33.6K just using firmware upgrades - which was great for those of us who got free modem upgrades that would have cost a few hundred bucks at each step. (Not to mention that power management actually worked with the MWave, too.)
Furthermore, IBM had to build a machine that could work internationally, and MWave allowed them to do it in software and not ship different versions of the same hardware.
They were probably a little slow to move off of MWave when 56K solidified and winmodem type hardware got real cheap. But back in the day, I can see how MWave made sense as engineering solution for the time.
(The MWave originally shipped with DOS and OS/2 support. Later NT and Win95 support was added. So it never really was a "Winmodem".)
Re:Double correction (Score:2)
At the last company that I worked for, we had a modem driver written by another company (it was a software modem) for our game console, and we were trying to write a new driver for it (since we wanted bugfixes, etc.), so we had to check out the legal documentation. It seems that the FCC here in the US had certified the existing combination and didn't allow for changes, but the Canadian government didn't quite care as much (I don't know why).
I believe (though I am not 100% sure) that much of the reasons for these requirements are the regulations for line load and interference. If you take too much of the line load, then you'll render all phones in the house inoperable, and if you allow too much interference, well, that pretty much speaks for itself.
Joe
Re:The DSP files CANT be open source because of FC (Score:2)
The better argument for releasing the binary-only DSP software is that this software doesn't actually run on the host computer so it could be described as part of the hardware. For those of you saying that you need to be able to modify the DSP code so that you can use a modem as a video card, get a grip. If you really want to do that kind of thing get a soldering iron and buy parts better suited to the job.
_____________
Re:Ironic (Score:2)
.dsp files: double standard (Score:2)
Let me begin by saying I am one of the most die-hard free software advocates out there. I have yet to read any article by RMS that I disagree with.
That said, your complaint that the dsp modem algorithms, which would typically be present in hardware, should be given to the world in source form, is enough to give even me pause.
So-called hardware algorithms, written in microcode and etched in silicon, are pervasive in the computing world, not just in modems, but also CPUs, hard drives, network cards, video cards, and a whole lot more. The free software community has not demanded release of such silicon code in the past. Whether or not we should is a different question. I suspect that if you put the question to RMS directly, he would have to advocate free-ness of the code. However, even the FSF purchases and uses hardware containing such (closed-source) silicon code without compunction.
I myself think (and I may even find myself disagreeing with RMS on this one, although to be fair I haven't asked him for his view) that the need for free software stops as soon as you start talking about software that is so integrally tied up with the hardware, that you would need whole new hardware to even contemplate making use of changes in the software. Processor microcode, hard drive error correction algorithms, and yes, modem dsp code, all fall into this category. I do not require the availability of Intel Pentium microcode, Seagate hard drive error correction code, or IBM modem dsp code when purchasing hardware, and neither should you.
Re:Are winmodems really that bad? (Score:2)
Well, assuming that the sources know what they are talking about, then no. The winmodem can't suck up enough cpu/memory so that games would take a hit, therefore, we must assume that the overhead a winmodem imposes on a system is rather small. (Which makes some sense, since cheap winmodems work on a p133 or so.) Therefore, if you are running something less intensive then a 3d online game, presumably, you have the resources to spare for a winmodem. Thus, if a winmodem cost you less then a hardware modem, you come out ahead.
Just my $.02
Re:Double correction (Score:2)
Yeah, ok for anything other then "understanding" the code you also need to compile it. Of corse a big old datasheet for the DSP would let someone hack up a version of gcc, or a perl script that may be able to compile things. It is much harder to turn a big binary glob into useful source.
Driver source with binary firmware glob -- nice start. Driver source with firmware source (and bin) even better, but not perfect. Driver source with firmware source, and firmware compiler source way better (let's assume the firmware compile is written in a language we already have a compiler/interpreter for).
Re:Are winmodems really that bad? (Score:2)
why don't people read the fucking moderator rules.
whomever rated this "overrated" is obviously a fucking moron.
there is a "post at 2" threshold you stupid fuck. if you are above a certain level your posts default to 2. get a fucking clue
[/rant]